TETHERING THEIR HORSES TO A sapling, Janet Todd and her father walked into the hot, still woods at the far end of their property. Birds twittered listlessly around them. The drought continued, all but extinguishing life from the land. In a valise Janet carried the folded figure of a man that she had cut from an old bedsheet. She had given him a face and a soldier’s kepi and a pair of epaulets on his shoulders.
She pinned the figure to a tree and retreated a dozen steps. From the valise she took the Colt repeating pistol her father had used in Mexico. Since she insisted on riding to Indianapolis with the Sons of Liberty, Gabriel Todd had decided she should know how to use a gun.
Janet flipped open the chamber and inserted six bullets while her father watched approvingly. He had all but stopped drinking two weeks ago. The change in him was marvelous. Janet thought he already looked five years younger. As the calendar marched toward their day of deliverance, Janet had felt renewed love and admiration for this man.
Feet planted firmly, she raised the silver gun with two hands. She had been amazed by how heavy it was when she first hefted it. “All right,” Gabriel Todd said. “Remember, squeeze, don’t pull. Fire one bullet at a time.”
Blam! The gun exploded and the figure fluttered slightly.
“Good shooting. That hit him in the chest.”
Blam!
“Even better. That hit him in the head.”
Would she be able to hit a living man that way? Janet was not sure. If he was wearing a blue federal uniform, perhaps. But what if he was some ordinary Republican farmer, trying to resist their revolution? She told herself it was kill or be killed—and in her case possibly raped as well.
She put six bullets into the sheetman. The last four were in his arms and legs. She had let those wandering thoughts distract her aim. In a battle, if there was one, there would be no time for thoughts. Paul’s description of Gettysburg and Antietam made that clear.
They rode back to Hopemont through the empty fields. None of their hands had returned. They had probably joined the Union Army—a guaranteed refuge for runaways now. General Burbridge had issued a proclamation assuring every black who joined up protection from his hapless master.
“Will the western confederacy legalize slavery?” Janet asked.
“I doubt it,” Gabriel Todd said. “We’ll simply tolerate it in states where it already exists, like Kentucky and Missouri. It would be a mistake to bring that question before the legislature.”
Janet sensed his discomfort and dropped the subject. Every time they discussed the future confederacy, problems like slavery loomed. Janet had gradually become aware that her father was concealing grave doubts about his brainchild. The northern tier of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio had been settled by New Englanders and other migrants from the East. The settlers of the Ohio Valley had been from the South. The two sections were divided on almost everything, from religion to slavery to politics.
But the calendar, that relentless agent of change, had already carried them beyond doubts. It was August 28. Everything was in place. The Confederate armies were still holding their own before Atlanta and Richmond.
For fifty miles on both sides of the Ohio River the Sons of Liberty were oiling their Spencer repeating rifles. At this very moment, perhaps, additional Confederate agents were arriving in Chicago with their valises of Greek fire.
“I wish you’d give up this idea of riding with us,” Gabriel Todd said.
“My mind is made up, Father,” Janet said.
“I’m not just worried about your safety. I’m thinking of your mother. She’ll be left alone—”
“The servants are still loyal. They’ve gotten over Lucy.”
She had spent hours in the slave quarter nursing Lucy’s mother, Lillibet. Janet told her Lucy was alive and free—and she was sorry her father whipped her so badly. Janet also said her father never should have sold Maybelle. She promised he would never do anything like that again. Lillibet returned to her kitchen and the other house servants also went back to work.
Gabriel Todd abandoned the argument. “Just promise me you’ll do exactly what I tell you if any shooting starts.”
“What will that be?” Janet asked.
“I don’t know. It depends on the situation.”
I’m not a mere woman, Father. I’m an adventuress. She wanted to say something like that to explode his image of her as a creature who needed and wanted protection. But he would never understand. Adventuress, with its overtones of sexual license, would shock him.
On Hopemont’s veranda they discovered Rogers Jameson waving an envelope. “Adam’s in Kentucky with his men!” he said. “He sent Pompey ahead with this letter for Janet.”
The letter had gotten badly crumpled in the hours it had spent in Pompey’s pocket. Janet smoothed it against her thigh while Jameson talked about how eager his Sons of Liberty brigade was to begin the march on Indianapolis.
He peered into Hopemont’s open front door and added, “Good thing that Yankee chief of staff of yours ain’t on the premises. This letter could turn him green.”
“I’m sure Colonel Stapleton and Colonel Jameson will let Janet choose between them when peace is at hand,” Gabriel Todd said.
Janet was glad she had never mentioned Adam’s aborted challenge to a duel during his July visit. Her father obviously favored Paul and would be dismayed by Adam’s preference for a violent solution.
“I suspect your ambush last week has scared the liver out of Colonel Gentry,” Gabriel Todd continued. “I bet he’s got Stapleton designing redoubts all around his property.”
“We’ll toss a coin to see who gets the pleasure of shooting that one-armed two-faced scum,” Jameson said.
In the front parlor, Janet smoothed Adam Jameson’s letter again and again. She did not want to open it. She did not want her mind and heart confused by anything but the machinery of victory. She only wanted to think about men and guns, about guns and men. She would think about love when the killing ended.
But she had to open the letter. There might be important information in it.
Dearest Janet:
We’re on the march at last. I have a plan to augment our ranks. When I reach the Bluegrass, I’m going to declare that region of Kentucky part of the Confederacy and announce we’re drafting every man of fighting age. I have a feeling a lot of young men are only waiting for a push to declare for the South. It will also be a first step toward combining or at least connecting the southern confederacy with the western confederacy. My men will be the
link between the two countries. I like that idea, don’t you?
I keep thinking of the loyalty, the courage, you displayed on my behalf the day Burbridge raided Rose Hill. I’m looking forward to repaying that swine for his insults to you and Momma. The humiliation we inflicted on him that morning is only a down payment on the full punishment he deserves for that and all the other crimes he’s committed against southern supporters in Kentucky. My men are in superb shape. We’ve spent every day of the last month training to fight from the saddle or dismounted.
In regard to our route, I’ve decided to swing west of Daviess County into Henderson County and join you from that direction. The federals have pretty large detachments blocking the more direct and obvious routes. I’ll ride ahead with forty picked men and join you and your father and Pap for a final talkover the night of August 28.
Whatever happens, the thought that you and I are together in this thing heart and soul has given me the rarest of gifts for a southern soldier at this point in the war: hope. God is involved here somehow, Janet, bringing us together in His own way. I believe that with all my soul.
Love,
Adam
Hot tears rose in Janet’s throat. Paul Stapleton had never linked their love to God and the southern cause that way. His love for her had enlisted him under its banner, had opened his eyes to its justice. But other sentiments—his West Point oath, the looming figure of his brother, the general—made such simple enthusiasm impossible.
She knew all this. She had accepted it as part of the bargain she had forged with herself, with Paul, with God. Why did Adam’s words shiver her resolution? Was it that accuser’s voice, whispering, You wanted him? Did she feel some sort of obscure need to expiate a sin? Adventuresses did not worry about such things.
As they sat down to dinner about three o’clock, hooves clopped in the driveway. Janet opened the front door to discover Mrs. Virginia Havens descending from her carriage. The spiritualist seldom kept a consistent schedule. She showed up pretty much as she pleased, once she was sure of a warm welcome.
Janet rushed into the dining room. “It’s Mrs. Havens, of all people. Shall I send her away?”
Gabriel Todd thought for a moment. “No, let her come in. Maybe it’s time I joined you for a session. It might make your mother feel better if something happens to me on our adventure.”
They were all riding into the valley of the shadow of death. Janet remembered Paul’s warning that Lincoln and the Union Army were not going to accept this revolution in their rear passively. She nodded and invited Mrs. Havens to join them for dinner.
Mrs. Havens was dressed in white as usual—and was as spherical as ever. She clutched a Bible in her hand and chattered about a “perturbation” in the atmosphere. Some sort of large spiritual event was about to occur, she was convinced of it. “It may well be a kind of gathering of the souls of the dead,” she said in her husky voice. “I begin to think there’s a kind of intermediary world where the newly dead await their loved ones. Especially soldiers who die violently.”
“I believe the ancients called it the shore of the River Styx,” Gabriel Todd said, glancing wryly at Janet.
Mrs. Havens had never heard of the River Styx. Or of Charon, the ghastly boatman who ferried the dead
across its dark still waters to Hades. Janet was thoroughly familiar with the myth. Although St. Mary of-the-Woods’s nuns were French Roman Catholics, they gave their graduates an excellent classical education. It was one of the reasons that her father had selected the school for her. This pagan faith of the old Greeks and Romans was all Gabriel Todd really believed.
Odd, how formal a father’s relationship with a daughter was. Gabriel Todd never shared his inmost thoughts about so many things—love, sex, marriage. When it came to God, Janet realized with a pang that she could not escape St. Mary’s. Beyond or beneath all her doubts and her defiant embrace of an adventuress’s role she still believed in the vast mysterious being they had worshiped there.
As Mrs. Havens labored up the stairs ahead of them, Gabriel Todd whispered in Janet’s ear, “Do you think she’d stay with Mother if we offered her enough money?” Janet nodded yes.
In her bedroom, Letitia Todd embraced Mrs. Havens. Her mother was totally unaware of their plans for tomorrow, of course. That made it more poignant when Gabriel Todd said, “Darlin’ wife, Mrs. Havens here has convinced me I ought to join you for this excursion. I almost hate to admit it but she’s put a patch of faith on my heathen soul. I don’t know how she did it—”
“I’ve prayed and prayed for something like that to happen,” Letitia said.
Mrs. Havens beamed and Janet drew the window drapes, reducing the room to semidarkness. Mrs. Havens lit a single candle in a silver holder in the center of the table. She recited her incantation to the God of the dead and urged the Todds to concentrate on their loved ones to facilitate communication from the spirit world.
They waited in silence. Nothing happened. The spirits
remained silent. “Lord God of the dead, your servants are here, looking for wisdom and consolation,” Mrs. Havens said. “Are you listening to our plea?”
More silence.
Mrs. Havens renewed her plea three more times with the same negative result. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “We seem to be in some sort of vacuum. I can sense my messages are not going beyond this room. Yet as I rode up the drive I sensed a spiritual host hovering around me. I was certain that there would be rich communication.”
Was it possible that Mrs. Havens was not a fraud? The medium apparently did not concoct those spiritual voices in which she spoke. She waited humbly for some sort of power to take possession of her vocal chords. That was why the voice that had taken command at the end of her previous visit had frightened her so badly.
“Why is this happening, Mrs. Havens?” Letitia asked.
“There’s another presence here, more powerful than the voices of the dead. Someone or something who is determined to deny us the consolation we seek. Some kind of angelic emissary, I think. I sense anger emanating from him, sealing up the windows of the room like shutters of steel.”
“Why—oh why?” Letitia Todd wailed. “I’ve prayed and prayed for the boys’ souls, exactly as you told me.”
“I’m sure you have. But you are not alone here, dear Mrs. Todd. We come together as a band of seekers. Alas, one of us must be wishing for something that’s forbidden.”
Janet trembled. Damn the woman! Was she wishing for the freedom to love Paul Stapleton and Adam Jameson? Wasn’t that what an adventuress would do? Love them on alternate nights, keep them both in her power?
“Maybe there’s another explanation, Mrs. Havens,” Gabriel Todd said. “Maybe the silence is telling us the
boys are happy in Abraham’s bosom. They’re no longer concerned with the trifling woes of us earthbound mortals. Maybe we’re being told it’s time to trust in faith and abandon signs and wonders.”
“It’s never happened to me before, Colonel Todd. I swear it!” Mrs. Havens said.
“I have an idea. Why don’t you stay here with Mrs. Todd for a few days? We’ll pay you for your time. Perhaps the spirits will return when two doubters like me and Janet are out of the house. We’re planning a trip to Cincinnati.”
“Cincinnati? Why in the world?” Letitia asked.
“We’ve got to find some hands to work this farm, Letty. I’ve been told there’s a raft of unemployed Irishmen down there that can be hired cheap. Strong boyos who can do the work of three slaves. I want Janet to come with me. They may want to bring wives with them and she can talk to the women.”
“Can we afford it? We barely made a profit with slaves.”
“We’ll have to try. We’ll leave you and Mrs. Havens now. Rogers Jameson and some friends are coming in for cards. The servants will bring you supper in a few hours.”
Janet and her father went downstairs. “I hope that didn’t trouble you,” Gabriel Todd said.
“Of course not,” Janet lied. “I never took Mrs. Havens seriously.”
“Good. Let’s prepare for our trip to Indianapolis tomorrow. We won’t have a minute to spare once Jameson and his colonels arrive.”
In the kitchen, Janet asked Lillibet to fill two haversacks with enough salted ham and dried beef to last two or three days. Also enough cornmeal to make cakes in a skillet over an open fire and plenty of bread. In her room, Janet took the pistol from the valise and slipped it into a
holster she planned to carry on a leather shoulder strap, concealing it beneath a light cloak. Beyond an extra dress, she saw no need to burden herself with clothes.
Hoofbeats thudded on the twilit drive, soon followed by male voices downstairs. She found her father and Jameson and his colonels in the dining room, helping themselves to drinks from the sideboard. She offered to bring them anything they wanted from the kitchen but they all said no. For the time being they would fortify themselves with good old Kentucky bourbon and eat something just before they began the march to the ferry. She sat down at the table with them, contenting herself with a glass of water.
They were all Rogers Jameson’s age—about fifty, with faces weathered from years spent in the sun and wind and rain on their farms. They looked durable but not terribly bright. None of them had Jameson’s forcefulness. Once more Janet wondered if he could or would obey orders.
Gabriel Todd unrolled a detailed map of Indiana, revealing all the roads and rail lines. He and Paul had been thinking a good deal about their march to Indianapolis. They had decided it might be useful to commandeer the railroad and put as many men as the available cars could carry on a train that would roar ahead of the main army and outflank enemy attempts to block the roads and river crossings.
Rogers Jameson shook his head. “It’s too risky, Gabe. There ain’t enough cars to carry more than a thousand men. That’s not enough to handle a heavy attack. They could get surrounded and cut up before we got to them.”
“There’s plenty of Sons of Liberty up ahead who’ll come out to help them,” Gabriel Todd said.
“They ain’t got Spencers,” one of the colonels said. “It’s them guns that’ve given our boys confidence. Nobody wants to fight the federals with a squirrel gun.”
The colonels all nodded in unison. They were backing
Rogers Jameson. Janet found herself wishing Paul were here to support Gabriel Todd. Her father was thinking like a cavalryman. He knew the value of lightning strikes in the enemy rear. Such bold moves cut communications and created fear and disorder.
A strange tinkling sound interrupted them. Janet realized it was coming from the cut-glass chandelier above their heads. Something was shaking it. What? Surely not the wind. Then Janet heard a deeper sound, a kind of muffled thunder. She realized it was the hooves of hundreds of horses.
Janet rushed to the front parlor window, followed by Rogers Jameson. They gazed out at a terrifying sight. Coming down the drive and across the lawn was a tidal wave of federal cavalrymen, rank after rank. The lead horsemen carried pine torches. Just ahead of them rode Major General Stephen Burbridge.
“My God!” Janet gasped.
“Jesus Christ!” Rogers Jameson snarled.
He raced back to the dining room. “Guns!” he roared. “Where the hell are your guns, Gabe? There’s a thousand federals on the lawn. Someone’s ratted us!”
“In the case—in the library,” Gabriel Todd said.
They raced into Hopemont’s library. Around them loomed the books that Gabriel Todd had enjoyed all his life. With trembling hands he tried to open the gun cabinet. Rogers Jameson snatched the keys away from him and opened it. He handed shotguns to the colonels. They shoved shells into the chambers.
“I’ll fight, too!” Janet cried. “I’ve got a pistol.”
“GABRIEL TODD AND ROGERS JAMESON AND YOUR FELLOW TRAITORS!” General Burbridge was using a metal speaking trumpet. “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE. WE’VE ALREADY SEIZED THE WEAPONS AND SUPPLIES YOU HAD STORED AT ROSE HILL. SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY. THE HOUSE IS SURROUNDED.”
“There ain’t enough of us to make a stand, Rogers,” one of the colonels, Sam Davidson, said. Fear drained manhood from his face. His words had a similar effect on the other colonels.
“If we hold out until midnight, the brigade will start arrivin’,” Rogers said. “They’ll take’m in the rear.”
“That’s four hours away,” Davidson said.
“You want to rot in some federal jail? It’s our only chance!” Jameson roared.
“DO YOU HEAR ME? IN EXACTLY ONE MINUTE WE WILL STORM THE HOUSE!” Burbridge said in his tinny voice of doom.
“Wait a moment!” Gabriel Todd said. “Wait—a—moment! We are not goin’ to fight them. My wife is upstairs an invalid. My daughter, my only survivin’ child, is standin’ next to you. I’ll go out on the veranda now and surrender to them. If you fellows want to try to get out the back way, go to it. I’ll do my best to keep them occupied for a few minutes.”
“I always knew you had no guts,” Rogers Jameson snarled. “All we got to do is kill a few and they’ll keep their distance for the rest of the night. They’re third-rate soldiers. If they were any good they’d be with Sherman in Georgia.”
“WE’VE GOT SOME OF YOUR GREEK FIRE OUT HERE! WE’RE READY TO USE IT,” Burbridge said.
“See what I mean? He don’t want to storm us,” Rogers Jameson said.
“Janet,” Gabriel Todd said. “Go upstairs and get your mother down to this floor.”
Janet raced upstairs. In her bedroom she slung her pistol and holster over her shoulder and tied the gray cloak at her throat. She was going to defend herself. She was not going to surrender. She was not going to prison.
In her mother’s room, Mrs. Havens was standing at the window, terrified. “Miss Todd, what’s happening?
Are those horsemen real? They look like spirit riders of the apocalypse!”
“They’re all too real. Help me get my mother downstairs.”
“What is it, Janet? What’s happening?” Letitia Todd cried.
“I’ll explain later, Mother,” Janet replied.
Together Janet and Mrs. Havens hoisted Letitia to her feet and labored down Hopemont’s curving staircase. As they reached the bottom step, Gabriel Todd joined them. “Janet, I want you to come out on the veranda with me,” he said. “We’ll insist on our innocence. The other fellows are goin’ to run for it through the garden. Mrs. Havens, stay here with my wife.”
Mrs. Havens nodded numbly and helped Letitia to a large Tudor chair a few feet from the door. Gabriel Todd opened the door and stepped into the flickering torchlight. As Janet followed him, she realized she was carrying her gun. She could only pray no one noticed it beneath her cloak.
“I have no idea what you’re here for, General Burbridge,” Gabriel Todd said. “I hope you do.”
“I’m here to arrest you for treason! Where’s the rest of them?”
“There’s no one in the house but me, my daughter here, and my invalid wife and a guest,” Gabriel Todd said.
The drumming sound again. Not quite as heavy. It was coming from the darkness beyond Burbridge’s mass of mounted men. Janet’s eyes leaped past the federal phalanx and saw a line of gray-uniformed cavalrymen emerging from the darkness. Leading them was a huge black-bearded man. It was Adam Jameson and his horsemen.
It was a miracle of deliverance. Janet’s heart leaped into a stratosphere of fierce gratitude that transcended love and desire. The Confederates pulled up about ten
yards from the federal horsemen. Suddenly there were shotguns in every gray-uniformed rider’s hands. A blast of flame tore a terrific gap in the federal ranks. Men screamed and toppled; horses bolted. Adam drove his horse through the opening toward the Todds on the veranda, firing left and right with two pistols. He pulled up at the foot of the steps and shouted, “Come on!”
Janet realized he was talking to her. He could do nothing for her parents or Mrs. Havens. She was the one he wanted to rescue from a federal prison. He leaned down and she leaped from the steps onto his arm. He slung her into the saddle in front of him as if she weighed no more than a doll.
Bullets whizzed around them. The federals were firing back. Adam’s men were answering them with pistols. She saw how few the Confederates were—and remembered what Adam had written about riding ahead with forty picked men. He was taking a desperate gamble to rescue her.
A federal cavalryman charged Adam with upraised saber. He shot him out of the saddle, hauled his horse’s head around, and started for the darkness at the end of the drive. Just ahead of them Janet saw a dozen Confederates flung out of their saddles by bullets. Riderless horses dashed left and right, whinnying with terror. General Burbridge was shouting commands. The night was livid with booming guns and roaring cursing troopers.
“I’ve got a gun!” Janet said and tried to pull it out of the holster.
Chunk. An alien sound. The horse lunged ahead. But Adam was no longer in control. The hand that had been holding the reins was clutching his head. The horse slewed drunkenly. Adam was wounded! Janet grabbed for the reins. Sprawled against him, sitting sideways, she could exert no control. Adam regained the reins and hauled the horse to a stop.
“My eyes,” he said. “My eyes are gone.”
Hooves pounding. A dozen federal cavalrymen surrounded them. Head drooping, Adam sat motionless in the saddle. Janet reached for her gun. They would die together here. But something froze her hand on the butt. What was the point of dying now? The western confederacy had been betrayed. Victory had dwindled to a forlorn dream. Adam needed help.
She jumped to the ground. “This is Colonel Adam Jameson,” she said. “He’s wounded. We must get him to a doctor.”
To her amazement, the cavalrymen sheathed their sabers and holstered their pistols. “So that’s Adam Jameson,” one said.
“Never thought I’d see him alive,” another one said.
“We’ll do what we can for him, Miss,” a third said. “We’ve got ambulances down the road.”
For a moment she was bewildered by the code of the soldier. She realized that three years of war had created a separate world for these men in which they did unto the enemy what they hoped the enemy would do for them. Maybe the hatred did not go as deep as she had thought. Maybe there was still some kind of bond in the word American.
She took the reins of Adam’s horse and walked back toward Hopemont. The troopers rode on either side of her. When they were about halfway there, the lower floor of the house exploded into bright yellow flame. “No!” she cried.
“What? What is it?” Adam asked.
“They’re burning Hopemont.”
“The general’s usin’ that Greek fire stuff. He swore he’d do it,” one of the federal troopers said.
When they reached the gravel drive in front of the porch, Janet saw the bodies of the four colonels. They had all been shot many times. Their faces, their chests, oozed blood. But there was no sign of Rogers Jameson.
“Is Pap here?” Adam asked. His tongue was thick, as if he were drunk.
“No,” Janet said. “I think he got away.”
General Burbridge strode up to them. “Who’s this?”
“Colonel Adam Jameson,” Janet said.
“And you’re Janet Todd, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
Hopemont was burning furiously. The flames licked out the lower windows. Orange light glowed in the upper windows. Beyond Burbridge, Janet could see her father’s blank dazed face. Her mother clung to him, weeping. There was no trace of Mrs. Havens.
“You deserve to go to jail like the rest of them,” General Burbridge said. “But an agreement is an agreement.”
“General,” one of the federal soldiers said. “Colonel Jameson’s wounded bad. Hit in the eyes. Can we take him down to our ambulances?”
“I suppose so,” Burbridge said. “Personally, I’m inclined to hang him. But I’ve been reprimanded by Washington, D.C., for hanging and shooting too many people. Our idiot president apparently thinks I’m supposed to win this goddamn war without killing anyone.”
Adam was led away by an escort of four soldiers. A half-dozen of his men, all badly wounded, went with him, along with a dozen federals. The rest of Adam’s men were dead or had escaped into the night. Commandeering a horse from Hopemont’s stables, General Burbridge ordered Gabriel Todd to mount it.
“Where are you taking him?” Janet asked.
“To the federal prison in Louisville.”
In another five minutes they were gone. Janet was left with her dazed mother and the bodies of the four Sons of Liberty colonels and the dead Confederates, looking like creatures from a nightmare world in the glare of blazing Hopemont.
Mrs. Havens reeled out of the darkness and wailed over the dead. “I knew it, I knew it,” she said. “I knew
something terrible was about to happen. Not even the spirits of the dead could stand it! No wonder the angels have turned their eyes away from this war!”
“Come, Mistress,” said a dark Negro voice. “Come down to my place now. Come along. I’ll fix you some coffee.”
It was Lillibet, inviting Letitia Todd to her slave cabin. Numbly Mrs. Todd obeyed her servant.
Janet gazed in bewilderment at the dead men, the roaring pyre of Hopemont. Slowly, words penetrated her numbed brain. An agreement is an agreement. General Burbridge had said that. He had agreed with someone that she would not go to jail. Who was it?
Paul Stapleton. Who else could it be? He was the betrayer of victory. The seductive destroyer of her dream. Janet’s hand went to the butt of her pistol. If she ever saw him again she would kill him.